Yesterday I read Allison Burnett’s absolutely crazy and wonderful novel, The House Beautiful. This novel is charming, engaging, very funny, bizarre and sometimes gross, just like the New York City it portrays to perfection. Burnett writes an all-out love song for New York, the very special New York of all those who want something more than what they are supposed to want. It is a paean (and a send-up) to those who do everything to get to the big city and then do everything to stay, to live and to suffer there, all in the name of art, in the name of the individual and in the name of life. How many thousands of people have come to New York and for the first time ever found themselves finally at home? This novel was written for all of us, and also for all the others who don’t find New York to be their original womb but find it interesting and invigorating and fascinating. This novel is all that (well, not the womb part), and hysterically funny and a great read.
The book offers us a narrator, B.K. Troop, who is both omniscient and blind, as well as an admitted plagiarist, and the story he tells (steals, borrows, and imagines) is a wild ride. Troop rents out rooms in his decrepit brownstone, “cheap rooms” to budding artists, with mentoring thrown in. All his tenants must meet qualifications of “charm, beauty, talent, and most important, cultural and religious similarity…only English speaking pagans” need apply. Too bad he doesn’t demand the same of his lover: his gut would have been spared but as a delighted reader, it was just too fun to watch him squirm (and spy and steal and convince the authorities of his insanity: no trouble there). Watching all his crazy tenants (and their lovers, ex- and current, paid and unpaid, murderous and temperamental or stoic ad loyal) was just as fun and at times, even moving. Reading this book felt like New York City all over again, where to live is to think and to suffer and to have squalid good times.
This book had all the elements of a great book and I loved every bit: twisted and addicting plot, great characters involved in awesome struggles and failing or succeeding marvelously, plus tons of wit and intelligence to keep everything interesting.
